If there is anything my Certain Ethnic husband can’t resist it is a BOGO sale and guess what the local animal shelter had last weekend. Crone badge unlocked: we now have more cats in the house than people. These cats have approximately eleventy billion toys, unlike my first cat as an adult, who had the tape measure and an unshelled walnut I took from the garbage at Nature’s Bin, where I worked. Though I may be one of the downwardly mobile children of the Port Clinton High School Class of 1959, my street cats will surely have better!
Kittens are a delight, and frankly delight is welcome right now as we’re starting to notice my father-in-law’s absence in different ways, like all the things we’ll never be able to make fun of together (the Bud Light situation, e.g.), and I personally missed hearing Jim and his dad giggling together like Beavis & Butthead on their Father’s Day call. Also, it is the part of my work year where I’m sending out scholarship award invoices, white knuckling it that the eleventy billion students I’m responsible for will get paid on time, because that’s kind of the whole point of my job.
Summer has never been my favorite anyway. Reverse SAD is real. There will come a point, on the 12th straight day of 100+ degrees, right before I’m about to crack my cyanide tooth, where I will google “what happens if you put slivovitz in the ice cream machine.” And, summer is becoming even less palatable as middle age sets in, owing to strictly northern European genes and the enfattenment and temperature intolerance induced by running out of estrogen and f*cks. [Side note: please see Samantha Irby’s excellent comments on body negativity in this interview, which come as a sweet fart cloud of relief at the precise moment when a huge swathe of American women who grew up on “love your body” are finding out their body doesn’t work the same as it did before and no one told them that was going to happen.]
Moving on: I’m sure a fair few of you were morbidly glued to the television set last week re: the submersible full of billionaires that is currently at the bottom of the sea. You know, I remember, at age 9, watching Baby Jessica being lifted from the well as I sat on the Davenport with my Grammy, who chain-smoked Mores as I ate a bacon and ketchup sandwich and dill pickle from the deli at Fazio’s, and thinking, grimly: everyone will always remember her for this. Then, a year ago as I watched the US Supreme Court chuck my rights to bodily autonomy down the abandoned well of history, I thought: there is a woman walking around on Planet Earth right now who doesn’t know it, but whose name is going to get attached to a bill because she dies of a miscarriage. And finally, a futile entreaty to all of my billionaire readers: as someone who drove around in a rusty death trap until it literally disintegrated under my feet: please don’t cheap out on parts when you can afford not to. Or at least, leave your kids at home, lest a groundbreaking safety legislation bill be named after them someday.
At any rate, the sub story was at least an absurd distraction from the absurd nationwide assault on children’s books, which, to borrow a phrase from Vonnegut, is like putting on a full suit of armor to attack a hot fudge sundae. It was also a distraction from planning my MPH practicum and thesis. Committing to a Master’s in Public Health seemed like a great idea at the time (lol right before March 2020), but after a decade of having eleventy billion balls in the air (astute readers will note, the same number of cat toys in my house and students I’m responsible for), I’d like have a maximum two balls in the air, or better yet, one ball in a neatly labeled box in the garage.
Speaking of books, what have I been reading. Not much, honestly; I listen to the audiobook versions of Shirley Jackson’s The Road Through the Wall and Hangsaman on loop, pretty much, to study cadence and word use and phraseology and think about what I want my book to sound like read aloud. Every few years, I race through a couple hundred books, then I’ll take a year off and reread the same one or two books ad infinitum. In 2020, for example, I listened to Phillip Pullman’s The Secret Commonwealth at least four dozen times, because if you want to write a book people can’t put down, you should find a book people can’t put down and study it. I don’t remember where I read that but honestly it was probably an interview with Phillip Pullman. Also, there’s Cari Luna’s monthlong not-a-book-group on Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark, which I’m in the middle of but whose title I have to keep looking up because in my mind it’s just Doris Lessing’s menopause novel. (This one came to me through Darby, who you should subscribe to if you like literary conversation that is smart, but to borrow another phrase from Vonnegut, doesn’t crawl up its own asshole).
Anyway, thank you for co-meandering to the end of this Substack with me, and I hope summer isn’t the worst for you. But if it is, please let this extremely fierce marshmallow bedarling your cares away.
—CB